0. Decision makers are motivated by two emotions above all — fear and greed. In the case of enterprise IT, that equates roughly to saying they want to buy stuff that:

Is safe.

Will confer benefits.

1. For a marketing message to succeed, whatever its goals are, the “confer benefits” part of the story needs to be:

Compelling

Believed

2. The “safe” part needs to be believed too. Rational belief in the safety of doing business with you is good. Blind faith is even better, but usually is enjoyed only by the most established of vendors.

In some cases, that may be the greatest competitive strength they have.

3. To be believed, enterprise IT messaging generally needs to be:

Credible

Clear

A certain amount of exaggeration is expected, and easily shrugged off. It’s also possible to get away with a certain amount of vagueness, whether in a fear/safety story or when pitching something as new/innovative/exciting. But don’t overdo either.

Much of the technology I consult about boils down to performance. There are many sub-categories — parallelization, scalability, low latency, interactive response, price/performance, and more. But basically it’s about computers operating faster, within realistic resource constraints.

There are three kinds of benefits performance can offer:

It can allow you to do things more simply and/or cost-effectively (e.g., with less hardware or less tuning).

It can allow you to do things better. Examples include:

Faster-loading web pages for your customers.

Faster-responding queries for your business analysts.

Better prices on your algorithmic trading.

Better analytic results, perhaps from:

Using more data.

Running more queries.

It can allow you to do something that would be impractical otherwise (usually because of expense).

These benefits are easily confused. When a prospect says “I can’t do X with existing technology”, what she really means is often “I can’t afford to do X well enough to matter.” When a vendor says “We make it cheap and easy to do Y”, what prospects hear is commonly “Great! Now we’ll be able to do Y within our resources and budget.”

Given the breadth of the subject, it’s hard to generalize comprehensively about the marketing of performance claims. But my observations include: Read more

Much of what I do for a living* boils down to critiquing IT vendors’ strategy — for sub-10-person startups, for the largest companies in the IT industry, and for companies at all stages in-between. In the hope of making strategy analysis simpler, I’ve compiled a list of questions that every enterprise IT vendor has to answer, if it is to understand its own business. They’re posted below. If you can’t answer these questions, you don’t really have a strategy.

*E.g., consulting via theMonash Advantageand predecessor services. Every question on the list below has arisen recently in the course of my work, most of them many times over.

If you run an IT vendor, help run one, or aspire to do so, then I encourage you to give these questions a whirl. If you don’t think the answers are all knowable — either now or for the foreseeable future — it’s still advisable to make working guesses. Flexibility is a virtue — but even so, having a tentative strategy is far better than having no strategy at all. Strategy is to execution as design is to coding. The best time to fix software bugs is before you start coding; the best time to fix a bad strategy is before you’ve committed yourself to executing it. Yes, both the design and the strategy will need to be changed over time; but a smart, internally-consistent strategy is a lot better than a contradictory one, than an obviously hopeless one, or than no strategy at all.

This is a really long post, so I’ll summarize it up here. Explanations of each point follow below. Read more

It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.

My essential recommendation was:

… the two fundamental templates of layered technology marketing:

Enterprise IT product (proof-today messaging stack)

Tangible benefits

Technical connection

Features (and perhaps metrics)*

Persuasive details

Customer traction or proof-of-concept tests

and

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

Tangible benefits

Technical connection

Features (and perhaps metrics)*

Technical connection

Fundamental product architecture

The lower parts of the stack demonstrate differentiation, most directly addressing the “Why should I believe you?” question. The upper parts demonstrate value, answering “Why should I care?” But ultimately, credibility rests on the whole flow of the story, and is no stronger than the weakest of the five layers.

*In the original form I just said “features and metrics”. But truth be told, metrics — speeds/feeds/scale/whatever — are only as important as features in a minority of market segments.

Since then, consulting engagements have shown me there’s actually a third template; happily, it’s synergistic with either or both of the other two. That one goes: Read more